The next book preview follows, working title Deconstructing Scientology: Mental Therapy or Thought Reform? Reference, Antidote to Scientology Slavery.
This book traces and contextualizes the origins of Scientology’s cosmology.
Topics of treatment:
How science fiction and fantasy writer L. Ron Hubbard drew from five central influences to create and market a self-proclaimed ‘modern science of mental health’. Chiefly influenced by Sigmund Freud (and subsequent therapies derived from his work), Alfred Korsybski (and his brainchild general semantics), Aleister Crowley (and his black magic cult Ordo Templi Orientis), smatterings of both Western and Eastern religions, and nautical/naval/intelligence training, Hubbard packaged and artfully peddled what he would ultimately claim to be the only road to total freedom.
How Hubbard spent the rest of his life attempting to make good on Dianetics’ promises to invariably deliver a perfect, or clear, mind. How that effort resulted in the formation of a pop psychology cult and how that morphed into a fatalist religion with a fascist bent. How the insistence upon claiming 100% standard workability – in the face of roughly placebo range percentages of long-term satisfaction attained – necessitated the inculcation of belief and the implementation of strict discipline meted out against doubt or dissent. Hubbard’s self-proclaimed messiah stature completed the conversion from the field of science to the field of religion. How the messiah metamorphosis was accomplished by methodically wiping out record of Hubbard’s five primary influences and claiming his revelations instead to have been derived, with himself, from an other-worldly provenance.
How Scientology amassed wealth and power by developing into an archetypal bait and switch operation. New adherents were baited by claims of an heuristic, rational, secular approach to mental therapy and once enjoying some results were then switched into a monotheistic, bigoted, and vindictive religion.
The book demonstrates how inculcated fixation with ego (exacerbated by many levels of positive reinforcement), fear (compounded by a self-contradictory philosophy and formidable bureaucratic apparatus to enforce it), delusion (inculcated by hypnotism techniques), and paranoia (instilled by continuous preaching of doomsday scenarios), resulted in a toxic mix of cognitive dissonance as the dysfunctional end product that the world today knows as Scientology. The ‘only road to total freedom’ results in the adherent attaining certainty in his or her possession of super-human powers while at the same time maintaining just as certainly that he or she is at bottom a victim by virtue of attaining those powers.
Notwithstanding this ultimate result, the book argues that Hubbard and his work cannot be dismissed wholesale. In spite of whatever flaws led to Scientology’s ends, Hubbard possessed practical genius. His determined drive to fame and fortune – before his precipitous fall – by following his own methodologies left some insights in its wake. But, because of the totalitarian mind control mechanisms interwoven throughout the subject and its reliance upon mystery and secrecy to maintain loyalty and power, Scientology cannot survive the age of information. In the end, it was Hubbard’s plentiful draconian policies calling for blind devotion, unflinching loyalty, monopoly and conquest that guaranteed the subject’s demise.
Ultimately, Deconstructing Scientology reveals the dichotomous nature of a subject offering some workable methods of expanding individual determinism and awareness at the self-defeating cost of demanding self-imposed ignorance and forfeiture of conscience.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 